If a striking thing about the period just before Donald Trump’s second inauguration was the feeling that America was genuinely shifting to the right — wokeness crumbling, more minority voters and elite factions joining the G.O.P., every branch of government in conservative hands — a striking thing about the Trump administration is that it has governed as though none of this were the case. Instead, its approach belongs to a world where both the conservative position and the wider American situation are simply desperate and there’s only the narrowest of windows to wrench the country away from some apocalyptic fate.

The best term for this mentality is “black-pilled,” an online reference, based on a famous scene in “The Matrix,” to different pills that awaken people to hidden realities. A red pill lets you in on secret right-wing truths. A white pill persuades you that the world situation is better than you thought. And a black pill lets you know just how doomed we really are.

A merely red-pilled Trump administration would still be doing much of what the actual one is doing — pushing the envelope on executive power, making a bid to revive American manufacturing, trying to find ways to increase deportations, picking fights with Ivy League universities.

But the black pill helps explain the hyperactivity with which Elon Musk’s DOGE project set about cutting jobs and programs — no pause for assessment, just the chain saw. Or the chaotic haste that yielded a list of sweeping demands being sent to Harvard apparently by mistake. Or the no-pain-no-gain maximalism of Trump’s trade war. Or the impulse to engage in brinkmanship with a conservative Supreme Court. Or the seeming lack of concern for whether newly Republican constituencies might be alienated or freaked out.

The administration’s mentality exists in symbiosis with its most fervent online supporters, who have responded to each new foray with all-or-nothing takes. If we can’t bring all the jobs back/deport all the illegal immigrants/smash the Ivy League, we don’t have a country.

Let me take one illustration of this mentality, from a commentator who goes by the nom de guerre FischerKing and has more than 200,000 followers on X. Calling the American situation an “emergency,” with an added expletive, he writes: “The USA has elected a series of administrations from both parties who have given us a $37 trillion national debt, probably 30-50 million illegal aliens, woke ideology, and a series of pointless wars. But we’re supposed to care about ‘norms.’”